Early Bodged Attempt At Bugging A Lodgers Room

[emmpet8]

As I mentioned in my intro

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I have been involved with bands and some sound editing for theatre. Since starting to look back at some of my recordings made on different media and since finding this site, I’ve been thinking about how I achieved some of the stuff. As everything I’m writing is totally true and it’s the first time I’ve ever posted the stuff, I am changing names.

When I got my house it was a shell and needed extensive work. As I was planning on taking lodgers, I ran sockets for TV aerials into every room. I ran them down the surface and this meant holes in the ceiling for the co-ax cable to come through. I soon realised that if I left floorboards loose above them I could peep into various rooms. I had up to three lodgers at a time over a number of years and saw quite a few “interesting” things, but unfortunately recording didn’t occur to me. I even had one lodger who was a highly sexed attractive girl of 19 and into long sessions of phone sex, but didn’t think of trying to record. Looking back, I can’t for the life of me think why. Although there must have been a book’s worth of lodger incidents in the time I was letting, in the end I got fed up with so many people and decided to live by myself.

After six months of piece I decided to let the largest and best room to a single person, figuring they wouldn’t be much hassle. I had lots of people interested, but in the end I let it to a 20yo girl I’ll call Lynn, who was a petite and attractive nanny to a family’s baby by day. It was then that I got the urge to listen in and in particular to phone conversations, as she had her own line into the room. My first attempts were the old glass against the wall of an adjoining room, but it wasn’t very satisfactory, or comfortable for more than a few minutes. The idea of listening through her door was tempting, but the risk of her coming out and catching me was too high.

My mind then turned to ‘bugging’ her room, so I came up with an idea and nearly got caught when attempting it. There were quite a few wires and cables on the front of the house and I decided one going into her room, like the phone line, wouldn’t notice much. She was usually out all day looking after the baby, so I thought I would risk it. I let myself into her room with a spare key (I pretended she had the only one) and removed a full length mirror from the wall. I then drilled a hole big enough for the small microphone to be seated in and smaller hole to the outside for the cable. I then fed the mic lead through, left the mic in place and replaced the mirror over the top of it. I carefully cleaned and tidied everything up before moving to the outside of the house. I had only just got up the ladder to the cable when she turned up in her car with the baby she looked after!

If she had been ten minutes earlier I would have been caught in her room. As it was we just exchanged a few pleasantries and she must have assumed I was just doing a bit of maintenance. After collecting some stuff from her room she left again and I finished the job off. The rest was quite easy, as it was just running audio cable to my living room. I listened by using headphones plugged into a cassette deck set to pause/record, with a view to releasing pause if anything sounded interesting. I was a bit silly, as this meant me sat for hours and wasn’t really practical. At the time though I couldn’t wait for her to come home, so I could listen in. When she did I was straight on the headphones and I got my first sounds. Problem was they were rubbish, as the mirror muffled everything.

It was back to the drawing board and this time it worked well. I also solved the problem of leaving everything unattended for several hours, which was an added bonus. As this post is already very long I’ll leave an explanation of how I achieved it and some of the things I heard to a later post if anyone is interested.

[yeppie]

Thank you emmpet8, very interesting story and well written!
But I would be more cautious with the details of your story. What you described may be an eavesdropper´s dream but it is a severe crime in most countries.
I´d prefer you to stay with us for some time ...

[emmpet8]

Thanks for the note of caution yeppie. What details would you have suggested leaving out of my description.

[yeppie]

Everything in the context of bugging a room.